Town hall fat cats should be ashamed of their bloated pay packets, says Eric Pickles

Anger: Eric Pickles has accused Labour council bosses of dragging Britain back to the 1980s

Town hall bosses who refuse to take a pay cut while implementing savage cuts to front-line services should be ashamed of themselves, says Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles.

Only a quarter of council chief executives, who are earning £147,934 on average, have agreed to follow ministers’ example and slash their salaries.

Ministers are engaged in increasingly angry exchanges with local authorities which they accuse of closing services rather than cutting out middle managers, backroom staff or people in useless ‘non-jobs’.

At this weekend’s Conservative spring conference in Cardiff, Mr Pickles is due to launch the strongest attack to date from the Government on Labour council bosses, whom he accuses of trying to drag Britain ‘back to the 1980s’ with politically-motivated cuts.

Speaking to the Daily Mail yesterday, Mr Pickles said: ‘I can’t believe a chief executive can look their workforce in the face and say they are having to take all these difficult decisions, but they themselves are isolated from it.

‘How can they look themselves in the mirror in the morning? It’s no use them bemoaning the reductions that are having to take place in local government if they are not showing any leadership.’

The minister said some local authorities ‘seem to want to use the poor as a battering ram’.

He went on: ‘We have very clearly protected money for the elderly, clearly protected money for voluntary groups. Yet they are deliberately targeting them.

‘This is about saying “Let us do as much as we can to destabilise the economic recovery of the nation”.

‘They know there wouldn’t be that big a difference between the cuts we are forced to impose and those a Labour government would also have had no alternative but to implement.

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‘We are simply dropping expenditure down to levels that they were in 2006/7, and in some cases 2009. The most vulnerable authorities are being protected.’

Mr Pickles said he had been approached at a reception by a Labour local government figure, who warned him he was going to attack the Coalition’s ‘Big Society’ initiative by targeting cuts at charities.

‘He said: “We are going to show you”,’ Mr Pickles recalled.

He will use his speech today at the Tory conference to highlight the use of taxpayer-funded Barclaycards by 140,000 executives across the public sector.

While central Government spending on the cards of £500 or more is now made public, the local authority spending remains secret.

He will warn council chiefs that if they refuse to publish details of credit card spending on ‘restaurant meals and luxury awayday breaks’, he will force them to do so.

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Town hall fat cats should be ashamed of their pay packets, says Eric Pickles